A Thousand Days in Tuscany (4 page)

2
Figs and Apples Threaded on Strings

It’s the next morning but I’ve only just fallen asleep. And now someone is forcefully leaning on what must be our doorbell. I open my eyes to a slice of pink sun insisting itself between the two panels of Signora Lucci’s lace curtains, stippling our tangled legs in new light. I pull myself upright and into the the old green robe. I like the coolness of the stone floor under my feet as I walk from the bedroom through the hallway to the front door. Opening it a chink, I find a muddy plastic carrying case spilling over with squash blossoms, bouquets of them, each tied with kitchen string. There is no note. A visit from the Welcome Wagon, I wonder? I look for the courier, but no one is nearby. Now, I am certain the gift is Barlozzo’s. I carry the bounty downstairs to the kitchen, where sitting on the drainboard, the flowers look like a giant’s garden thrust inside a doll’s house. The proportion is wrong, and yet it appeals. Fernando and I pass on the stairs. I hear his “
ma guarda che roba,
but will you look at this,” when he sees the flowers and then his tinkering search for the espresso pot while I’m pulling on shorts and sandals, shouting down, “Why don’t we just run up the hill for
cappuccini?”

Up at the Centrale, some of last evening’s guests stand just where we left them. Save their less festive costumes, they seem not to have gone home at all. Crowded three or four deep at the bar, they’re quaffing 7:30 a.m. red wine, throwing back
caffè corretto,
greeting us, welcoming us back to the stomping ground. We say no, thank you, to the wine and the grappa-spiked coffee, standing firm for hot foamy milk and a shot of espresso, and they bewail our feebleness.

Wanting to pay our bill for the portions of last evening’s supper provided by the bar, we ask to see the owner. A woman called Vera, small and square with pale, rheumy oyster-colored eyes, invites us to the back table near the kitchen door and to settle ourselves across from her while she tallies. Working from a fistful of scraps—one of which reads
due chili di pomodori,
two kilos of tomatoes, another
affettati,
sliced, cured meats, the others I fail to read slant-eyed—she counts aloud, does the addition, scratches out her errors, counts aloud again, before finally asking Fernando to add the numbers. He writes the final figure and passes it over to her. “
Ma è così tanto?
But is it that much?” she asks, astounded.
“Contiamoci un’altra volta.
Let’s count again.” Fernando assures her that the sum is correct and
reaches for his wallet. The oyster eyes are troubled, they look despisingly at the scribbles.
“Senti, puoi pagare un pò ogni mese.
Listen, you can pay a little each month,” she tells us.

The bill for the
aperitivi, bruschette,
at least a hundred-and-fifty fried flowers,
salame
and prosciutto, what must have been two kilos of
pici,
and a river of red wine is lighter than a quick lunch à deux at Harry’s Bar. There is a great cost-of-living divide between a country mouse and a city mouse. Fernando and I try to ease Vera from her gloom. Enter Barlozzo.

There’s something of Gary Cooper in him, and I will learn that it’s always high noon when Barlozzo arrives. No niceties, not even a
buongiorno,
he asks if I’d put the flowers in a cool place. And he wants to know how I’m planning to cook them. I tell him I’ll probably make a frittata and then fry the rest as Bice and Monica did last night. The bar crowd quiets, shuffles position. My casually stated culinary intentions cause provocation. One by one they ease themselves over to the table where we sit across from the now less-troubled oyster eyes.

“
Ma perchè non un condimento per la pasta?
But, why not a condiment for pasta?” asks a man whose blue satin suspenders arch valiantly over the great girth of his pure white T-shirt before disappearing into the gully under his belly.

“Oppure una bella schiacciata?
Or a beautiful flatbread?”

“No, no, no. Oggi ci vogliono i fiori crudi con un mazzo di rucola, due foglie di basilico, un pomodoro, ancora caldo dai raggi del sole, un goccio d’olio. Basta.
No, no, no. Today you want the flowers raw with a handful of arugula, two leaves of basil, a tomato still warm from the sun, and a drop of oil. Enough.”

All this passion over a handful of blossoms. But I, too, am captivated by these lithe yellow flowers, having grown them over the years, sometimes begging space in friends’ gardens when I didn’t have my own, becoming familiar with their whims as plants, how their gentle savor can refine and ornament other foods as well as please on its own. All species of
zucca,
squash, sprout flowers in the first phases of growth, but it’s the flower of the
zucchine
which is hardiest. One must harvest the flowers when the squash is still small and slender, not more than eight to ten inches in length, plucking the flower along with the the squash so a new flower and a new squash can bud in its place on the vine. Blossoms grow from both the feminine and masculine zucchini, but the feminine flowers grow more broadly and bell-shaped. I’d noticed that nearly all the blossoms Barlozzo brought this morning were decidedly feminine.
“Come mai quasi tutti i fiori in questa zona sono femminili?
How is it that almost all the flowers in this area are feminine?”

The question brings on a bawdy laugh all around and it’s the blue suspenders who answers it. “Because we’re fortunate.”

Foolishly, I begin to banter with them, as though I were really a part of the discussion, saying that we must shop for the fundamentals to stock our pantry, that we have few provisions at hand and so something simple will do very nicely today, but they are off on a roll, reciting formulas, whispering gastronomic lore like vespers. Our squash blossom opportunities have stimulated an hour’s worth of appetizing talk, and it is evident that it matters not at all if we are there or gone away in the meantime. We say unheard good-byes and leave with Barlozzo close behind us. “They all know the truth, that there are only three subjects worth talking about. At least here in these parts,” he says. “The weather, which, as they’re farmers, affects everything else. Dying and birthing, of both people and animals. And what we eat—this last item comprising what we ate the day before and what we’re planning to eat tomorrow. And all three of these major subjects encompass, in one way or another, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, the physical sciences, history, art, literature, and religion. We get around to sparring about all that counts in a life but we usually do it while we’re talking about food, it being a subject inseparable from every other subject. It’s the table and the bed that count in life. And everything else we do, we do so we can get back to the table, back to the bed.”

We thank Barlozzo for the flowers, ask him to come by and join us for our premier lunch, but he refuses, proposing instead to come
by at four to see if we need help with the rest of the unpacking, with getting settled. He says this as though it is his job. He can tell us whatever we want to know about the house. This he says in a very quiet voice.

On the high curve of the piazza sits Sergio’s fruit and vegetable shop, so we look about for things to enhance our blossom-lunch menu. Sergio suggests a
fritto misto,
a mixed fry, of vegetables and herbs. He pulls out a handful of sage leaves, each one long and soft as a rabbit’s ear, whacks the leaves and small stems from a head of celery, picks through a basket of skinny green beans and adds some to our pile. He asks if we like potatoes but doesn’t wait for us to answer before digging into a cardboard carton of yellow-skinned ones, still covered in dirt, each no bigger than a cherry.

Four steps away up toward the church and the city hall is a
gastronomia
where we buy flour and sea salt, a bottle of beer for the batter and peanut oil for frying. I ask for eggs and the man cocks his head, looks pityingly at me, and says all I need do is stop at the hen house just down the hill from our place.
“Può prendere da sola, signora, direttamente là,”
he says in a snuffy tone as though egg gathering in a henhouse was a daily Tuscan sacrament.

Across from the
gastronomia
sits an
enoteca,
a wine shop, where we choose a Vernaccia and a bottle of tourist oil, as Barlozzo later calls it—a pretty, one-liter bottle filled with third-rate oil that costs
more than do five liters of the best stuff, straight from the mill. There is much to learn. The butcher, a jeweler, an
antichità,
the antiques shop, two other general grocers whose spaces are big as walk-in closets complete the shopping potential of the
centro storico.
It will take another long, sugarless day before we discover a
pasticceria
in town, tucked up and out of sight behind the church, and another bread baker on the slope that leads out of town toward the other side of the sheepfold.

I have never before gathered eggs from under a hen. Fernando has never before seen a hen. We bend low into the shed where perch a dozen or so fat lady birds. There’s no shrieking or fluttering at all. I approach one and ask her if she has an egg or two. Nothing. I ask in Italian. Still nothing. I ask Fernando to pick her up but he’s already outside the shed smoking and pacing, telling me he really doesn’t like eggs at all and he especially doesn’t like frittata. Both bold-faced lies. I start to move the hen and she plumps down from her perch quite voluntarily, uncovering the place where two lovely brown eggs sit. I take them, one at a time, bend down and nestle them in my sack. I want two more. I peruse the room. I choose the hen who sits next to the docile one. I pick her up and she pecks me so hard on my wrist that I drop her. I see there is nothing in her nest and apologize for my insensitivity, thinking her nastiness must have been caused by embarrassment. I move on to another hen and this time find a single,
paler brown-shelled beauty, still warm and stuck all over with bits of straw. I take it and leave with an unfamiliar thrill. This is my first full day in Tuscany and I’ve robbed a henhouse before lunch.

Back home in the kitchen I beat the eggs, the yolks of which are orange as pumpkin, with a few grindings of sea salt, a few more of pepper, adding a tablespoon or so of white wine and a handful of Parmigiano. I dig for my flat broad frying pan, twirl it to coat its floor with a few drops of my tourist oil, and let it warm over a quiet flame. I drop in the rinsed and dried blossoms whole, flatten them a bit so they stay put, and leave them for a minute or so while I tear a few basil leaves, give the eggs another stroke or two. I throw a few fennel seeds into the pan to scent the oil, where the blossoms are now beginning to take color on their bottom sides. Time to liven up the flame and add the egg batter. I perform the lift-and-tilt motions necessary to cook the frittata without disturbing the blossoms, which are now ensnared in the creamy embrace of the eggs. Next, I run the lush little cake under a hot grill to form a gold blistery skin on top before sliding it onto a plate, strewing it with torn basil. The heat of the eggs warms the herbs so they give up a double-strength perfume. Now I drop a thread of fine old
balsamico
over it. And, finally, let it rest.

Fernando and I batter and fry the sage leaves and celery tops, eating them right from the draining paper while standing in front of the
stove, daring to move only our upper bodies and even those parts with the skill of second-story men who samba. The kitchen is smaller than the one in Venice, smaller than any kitchen that doesn’t come in a kit. We fry only a few of the blossoms and all of the tiny potatoes and green beans and carry them out to the terrace with two glasses of Vernaccia and the frittata.

I ask Fernando, “How does it all seem to you—at this early point, I mean?”

“I’m feeling some of everything, I guess. There’s fear. And lots of excitement. I can’t yet believe it’s true that there’s no more bank, no more house on the Lido. I mean, it’s all precisely as I’d wanted it to be and, yet, it’s still too
untried
to seem real. And the house is, well, it’s so different from any house I’ve ever seen, let alone lived in. I know some of the rooms are cut up strangely, but all in all, it’s so big.” Fernando has lived his whole life in a succession of two small apartments, one less than a kilometer from the other, and so his impression of this strange old dwelling—half stable, half farmhouse—is predictable. Yet to me, the great eccentric space is intriguing.

“I like that it rambles. It’s feels more a refuge than a house, and I like it because it
is
so primitive, so rough. It’s the right house for a beginning. The outside looks so forlorn, though, almost scorned somehow, sitting on the edge of the road. Like there’s suffering clenched between its stones.”

Fernando moves from his chair to sit on the terrace floor, leaning his back against the house, sipping at his wine. “Certainly it’s not the Cà d’Oro but it doesn’t look suffered to me as much as it does
eroica,
heroic. It looks like a place that endures.”

“No central heating, no telephone, no television—we’re going to be short on comforts.”

“True. But we’re inventive,” he tells me, from out of his tenderest Peter Sellers grin. Three years ago, when I left America to come to live in Italy, it was neither Venice nor the house on the beach that lured me. Rather it was this man, this Fernando. It’s quite the same thing now. We’ve hardly come to Tuscany for a house.

Having found each other, now it’s innocence we’ve chased over the sea and all the way here to these pink-sand slopes. We’ve come here to make a life scrubbed clean of clutter, a life that follows the rhythms and rituals of this rural culture. A life, as they say here, that’s made
a misura d’uomo,
to the measure of man. We’re hoping this is a place that still remembers real life, the once-upon-a-time life, the hard parts and the joyful ones.
Dolce e salata,
sweet and salty. Like fasting before a feast, each side of life dignifying the other. It may be that everywhere in the world there is the possibility to live with this balance, but it’s here, right here, where we’ve come to look for it. And so we packed up the fickle stretches of time and gleams of light we think might remain for us and we ran hard and
fast to this place. We’ve come because we think it might be here where we can learn which way progress runs. Our suspicion is strong that there is a greater peace in going backward. We’ll see. What we know already is that life is a mayfly, flitting. We’ll caress each day into its simplest form, keeping the illusions thin if not altogether absent. We’ve just broken down the structure of one life and so the immediate building up of another would be only backlash. Especially before we’ve given ourselves the chance to determine what we truly desire from and believe we can accomplish by raising up new structure.